British Bees / An Introduction into the Studies of the Natural History and Economy of the Bees Indigenous to the British Isles

by William Edward Shuckard

Having fixed the station of the Hymenoptera generally, we have next to seek the relative rank of the natural divisions into which they readily separate.

Taking structure and instinct conjunctively, there can be no doubt that the first position will be conceded to that division of the Order which comprises the aculeated tribes—those armed with stings,—some of whose members, in each of the three large divisions into which they fall, being social, that is, living in communities, organized by a peculiar polity or administration.

These aculeates divide into, first, the fossorial Hymenoptera, or burrowers; and the equivalent branch the Diploptera, or wasps, distinguished and named from their folding the superior wings longitudinally in repose; secondly, the heterogeneous Hymenoptera, or ants, named from the dissimilarity either in size or structure of their females, a peculiarity incidental to all the social Hymenoptera, but living in community is more peculiarly characteristic of this division, it being in the other divisions restricted to a few genera only, whereas here the solitary habit is the exceptional. In all cases of socialism there are three classes of individuals,—males, females, and abortive females. In the other social kinds of Hymenoptera, these abortive females, called neuters, perform the labours of the community, and they are always winged; whereas amongst the ants they are never winged, and they constitute civil and military departments, the former attending to domestic matters, and the latter making predatory excursions to enslave the inhabitants of other communities, to aid their civilians in their many duties.

The third and last division of the aculeate Hymenoptera contains the Mellicolligeræ, the bees, or honey-gatherers.

Thus each division of the aculeated Hymenoptera is closely linked to the others by the strong affinity of the social habits of some of the genera of their several families.

The food of these three divisions of the aculeated Hymenoptera differs considerably, the Fossores being raptorial flesh-feeders, which hunt down and destroy their prey, and supply it as food to their young; the Heterogynæ are omnivorous,—grain, fruits, or carrion being equally welcome to them; but in these climates I am not aware that they destroy life, although their wide migrations within the tropics are undertaken in the very spirit of the Huns and Vandals, for they devastate everything they come across; but the whole family of bees are exclusively honey-feeders without any carnivorous propensities, and use their stings merely as weapons of defence.

Although all the social aculeates are edifiers, and although the wasp in its papier mâché domicile may vie with the honey-bee in capacity and skill in the structure of the hexagons of the habitation it erects or suspends, which are as perfect, and almost as delicate, although fabricated of a coarser material than those within the hive, and wherein also the several compartments form a more homogeneous unity, and the uniformity of the several layers or floors is more in accordance with architectural symmetry,—yet must the palm of precedence be accorded to the bee, from the more elaborate and perfect development of the social instinctive faculty.

We may be the more excused for this preference when we weigh the interest of the genus Apis to man. The wasp boots us nothing, but is the pilferer of our fruits, and a marauder upon the hive, whose inhabitants it destroys and consumes their produce, it being indifferent to them which they obtain—the bee or the honey,—either furnishing them with sustenance. The ant is obtrusive and incommodious, making incursions upon the pantry, the store-room, the green-house, and the hothouse; disfiguring our flower-beds, and often disgusting us with our aliment by the impertinent intrusion of its appearance. But the bee stores up for us honey, whose cruses are as inexhaustible as the oil cruse of the good widow of Zarephath, and whose waxen shards furnish us with a beautifully soft light, which in Catholic worship adds solemnity to the rites of religion. In doing this the bee fulfils a sovereign function in the economy of nature, by the fertilization of the flowering plants, with which she reciprocates benefits; the preponderance, however, is importantly in favour of the flower.

If captious objectors should dispute the position we thus claim for the bees, we will willingly leave them the wasp with its sting, whilst we sedulously cultivate the active and industrious bee, whose associations range through all the fields of poetry, but nowhere more lusciously than in the beautiful compositions of the Sanskrit poets Kalidasa and Yayadeva.

The position of the family, whose English constituents I shall subsequently treat of, being thus fixed, I have next to explain the several subdivisions into which it is divided in the following arrangement.